Thursday, June 17, 2004

Gloves are off in fight for email customers

Yahoo is taking on Google's Gmail head on with the launch of a double-your-storage 2 GB offer (but only for paying subscribers of their US ISP). From a position where free email providers were trying to monetise their services by limiting storage and charging for extra, Gmail's offer of free 1 GB storage has forced a major rethink.

Even beyond the big players, Aventure is offering a similarly storage-busting 2 GB, as a winner-takes-all mentality is starting to come into play.

It should be interesting to see how MSN responds or whether they are hoping that the millions of pioneering hotmail users will stick with their email addresses after all these years. I have both a hotmail and a gmail account and while it is still a pain having to constantly delete emails to keep it under the 2 meg storage level, it would be even more of a pain to change my email address. That said, if they started to charge for the hotmail service, the decision would be easy and GB storage here I come.

Note: In an earlier post, I talked about "Gmail account up for sale on e-bay" where the bidding was around the $20-30 mark, I note it's now around the $2-3 mark as supply and competitor offerings are starting to flood the market.